How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm • Hacker News Board

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#91

Post by belorn » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

EliRivers wrote: post #13

petewailes wrote: post #3

I suspect a large part of this is down to 1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and 2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work. The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching…

While I don't disagree with the general thrust of your argument, as an aside, the lack of men in nursing roles (and teaching, especially to younger children) is seen as a problem and when you spend time in the nursing or teaching community it comes up a lot. Campaigns to attract more men into these professions have been running for a long time. While I'm here, speaking as a townie, I don't see any complexity in the f…

Recently I read a report done by the national agency for higher education in Sweden, on order by the government, to study why there are so few male teachers. As part of the study, a poll was sent to each of the teaching districts in Sweden with question like "what strategies do the district have to increase the ratio of male student for the teaching profession." Out of 19, only 3 responded that they had any strategy at all to increase the ratio of male students, and out of the remaining 16, only 6 had some strategy regarding gender equality at all. One university simply replied by saying "in order to have a strategy, we first need to figure out why there is so few men who want to become teachers. More research needed.".

If it comes up often in the teaching community, its not something which much money is being directed to, projected being run, and time being spent on. There is no political pressure to apply affirmative action, no ear marked funds in the budget, and no policy changes in order to change the dominated female culture that the teaching profession has (The report attribute the culture as a major cause for male teacher having significant higher exit rate both as student but also after they have worked a few years).

As for campaigns "running for a long time", the report says the exact opposite. It explicitly say there hasn't been any significant effort to bring male student to female dominated professions, while the opposite has existed for about 50 years. It suggest that university programs should look at the past and current efforts to bring female students to STEM subject and use it as a guide in order to create programs for gender equality which also include male students.

Personally, I think the recent decided policy by Norway is a good step in the right direction. A simple policy that dictate that minority students, that is when the gender ration is less than 20%-80%, will receive some benefits/incentives to counter gender discrimination.

(The report is 2009:7 R, by the Swedish national agency for higher education)

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#92

Post by richmarr » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #47

jules wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that it's biased, but perhaps not in the way you think it is: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract > The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disgui…

We'd have to look at a meta-study to weed out problems in individual studies. "Encouraging everyone equally is great". We should probably just end the argument on that point we both agree :). The rest will work itself out. If everybody was encouraged and inspired equally and there were still imbalances your point will remain. Unfortunately, that's not true today, so we won't know. Iran and India have much higher repr…

> We'd have to look at a meta-study to weed out problems in individual studies

Or we could try not generalising outside the scope of an experiment. The experiment doesn't even cover all faculty hiring.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#93

Post by gus_massa » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:57 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #2

> like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so, would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real thing.

Hi from Argentina! The land of Maradona and Messi, but not Pele.

I find strange and slightly annoying that they say "soccer" instead of "football", but I consider that a part of the strange quirks of en-us, like calling "America" to "USA" or writing "January 1st" instead of "1st of January". But I'd nerved consider any of that like a type of offense or micro/macro aggression.

All that paragraph is very suspicious. For example, the reactions to the tequila sombreros and the Trump chalk signs were exaggerated by the press coverage: http://www.snopes.com/bowdoin-mini-sombrero-controversy/ http://www.snopes.com/emory-students-trump-graffiti/

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#94

Post by jules » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

richmarr wrote: post #87

jules wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that it's biased, but perhaps not in the way you think it is: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract > The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disgui…

Generalising from that study seems unwise. (a) Hiring faculty is a very different thing (and subject to different rules and policies) than getting students succesfully to graduation. (b) Unless male economists are uniquely meritocratic there's more at play here than personal bias. It seems more likely that the other subjects have a culture of progressively trying to redress historic gender imbalance. Since those pref…

The drop out rates for males are (much) higher.

You can speculate on the reason why the discrimination exists, but calling it "a culture of progressively trying to redress historic gender imbalance" is again a collectivist attitude, as if the treatment of somebody's grandmother somehow confers a debt that must be repaid to their granddaughter but not to their grandson, because the granddaughter is in the same tribe as her grandmother. From an individual perspective it's just discrimination. According to the study an individual human has a 2:1 hiring advantage compared to another individual human, simply because of an attribute that should not significantly factor into the decision. It doesn't suddenly stop being discrimination because the advantaged gender happens to be the female one. By the way, I think this is particularly damaging for the talented women who were hired on merit, because it becomes rational to believe that they they might not have been hired on merit.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#95

Post by hartpuff » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

petewailes wrote: post #3

I suspect a large part of this is down to 1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and 2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work. The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching…

> The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute.

Where is your evidence that the the most outspoken people who oppose fox hunting and badger culls do so because they think badgers and foxes are "cute"?

Why would people who oppose fox hunting go on fox hunts?

Why is going on hunts or owning cattle or living outside of a city necessary to validate an opinion about killing animals?

> Once you start believing that issues are simple, it's easy to fit everything into that framework and to wander round being outraged or offended or insulted by things

It's also easy to write people off whose opinions you don't like/accept, by pretending they only hold them for ridiculously simplistic reasons.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#96

Post by wccrawford » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #75

First writers started to use leaving the toilet seat up as a plot device to generate drama in sitcoms. Then others started to write light hearted articles in women magazines telling women how to deal with man who leaves toilet seat up. Now we have number of people who think it's something that can be reason to have a heated argument. My theory is that we are living in society where people take cues on how to deal wit…

I will never forget having this argument and her reason being, "I might accidentally sit on it with the seat up."

Yeah, that's gross and disconcerting, I'm sure. My response was that it was her responsibility to make sure she didn't sit on anything gross, and she should be looking where she's sitting anyhow.

My solution was to put the lid down with the seat. This is cleaner, looks nicer, stops the flush from spewing grossness into the room, and does not solve her problem at all.

Yeah, I was a little petty about it.

Of course, then I got complaints about the lid being down. I refused to budge on my position, and eventually she stopped trying to argue about it.

My take on the whole situation is that as we solved some really big problems, people needed a reason to complain or feel afraid. We went from worrying about dying constantly to worrying about getting a cold or totally treatable diseases. We're unable to stop worrying about something, and so things get blown out of proportion. We're obsessed with preventing everything that's viewed as negative.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#97

Post by jules » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:13 PM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #69

jules wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would hunting be torture, but slaughtering not?

Fox hunting, where the fox is chased around by dogs for a long time before it is finally killed, is torture. Hunting with a rifle, where you sneak up on an animal and kill it before it even knows it's being hunted, is not. I'd say bow hunting is a grey area; if you have to track the bleeding animal down while it is slowly bleeding out, that's cruel. But if you're hunting for survival and a bow is all you have, or if…

If you compare the worst case scenario for hunting (fox hunting) with the best case scenario for slaughter, but often the slaughter isn't fun either. Many animals are very distressed on their way to the slaughter. Even more importantly, the lives they had before that point were probably much worse than the lives of the wild foxes. Farming animals for meat also happens on a scale that is absolutely incomparable to fox hunting. More animals are slaughtered every day than the number of foxes that were hunted in the entire history of humankind.

Secondly, you say that hunting is permissible if you're hunting for survival. Why doesn't the same apply for slaughter? You don't need to eat farmed animals for survival.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#98

Post by tremon » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #78

reitanqild wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts in zoology, chemistry, genetics... IIRC, so are the ideas that wolves, an animal capable of eating sheep or even moose would not eat children if they happened to walk unprotected. Not saying we should get rid of wolves only that some realism need to be applied.

Well, if you want realism, wolves are one of the really select club of species of animals known to readily protect, nurture and adopt a lost human children if some circumstances occur. This is a fact, not a feeling. Do you know what other animals can be dangerous for a small children in a close encounter?: Buffaloes, mooses, deers, bulls, rams, bears, rats, horses, rhinos, donkeys, chimps, coyotes, pigs, snakes, raco…

Some of the most fantastic environmental fails were incubated in the local pub

For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly.

Oh how ironic. In which pub were you when you decided these two must be causally related?

Tick numbers are increasing because the climate is getting warmer. Also, ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population. But neither explanation has anything to do with wolves. In fact, wolf numbers in The Netherlands have doubled over the past year, and we're still seeing an increase in ticks.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#99

Post by goldbrick » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #64

Kristine1975 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Therefore, statistically and empirically women are more interested in pay-equity laws. I don't think that actually follows: 1. People are perfectly capable of caring for injustices they don't experience personally. E.g. men being interested in pay-equity laws not because it would benefit them, but because of a belief that they are necessary for a just society. 2. People are also perfectly capable of acting against t…

> I don't think that actually follows Which is why I said statistically and empirically. As to men caring about this too, this is obviously possible, but even if they care, they are less affected, so they may prioritize it less. Like the joke about the chicken and the pig vis-a-vis breakfast: The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed!

What does "statistically and empirically" mean to you, because it seems a lot like you are using it to mean logic is optional.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#100

Post by soundwave106 » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:24 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #37

pvaldes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute. You have your point, but is a common and too simplistic interpretation. We need to repeat this more: To have cattle or being able to shoot a rabbit is irrelevant and not a guarantee at all to und…

> all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts in zoology, chemistry, genetics... IIRC, so are the ideas that wolves, an animal capable of eating sheep or even moose would not eat children if they happened to walk unprotected. Not saying we should get rid of wolves only that some realism need to be applied.

It's possible, but statistically the likelihood these days is very low.

Typically (not always, but usually), a wolf attack is linked to either human habituation, or disease (rabies), or loss of natural resources (wolves will attack humans if they are "food of last resort"). Humans are, um, kind of dangerous to wolves in general, so typically they do their best to avoid us. There's only two known fatal wolf attacks in North America, and both are linked to habituation. In other areas there was probably more wolf attacks in the past (probably due to encroachment), but at present there's little reason to fear a wolf in North America.

Domestic cattle actually are far more deadly (about 20 fatalities a year in North America). And we haven't even crossed into the territory of the deadliness of, say, automobiles.

Balancing livestock / ranches in areas with wolf populations is definitely a real issue and a far more pressing concern. I think many who engage in both ranching and environmental management do understand the dual need to both balance the environment and make a living off the land. (http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Wolves-...)

My "gut feel observation" is that a lot of the really overtly binary debates in these sort of "environmentalism vs. hunting" debates comes from people who don't live in rural areas at all. Such as sport-only / pure recreational / trophy type hunters (many who are urban and well off... after all, isn't fox hunting traditionally associated with the UK upper class?) versus strict cute-and-fuzzy-animal environmentalists (many who also are urban and well off). So I'm not sure if the local farmers and hunters at the pub really are the ones you should necessarily point the finger at.